We Can Save Us All

by Adam Nemett

  Even here in college.

  David took it easy on drugs and alcohol but tried his best to get out and partake of the Princeton nightlife. The Street advertised its weekend slates of bands and DJs on lamppost flyers, and David and his hall mates endured many embarrassments before learning to differentiate band names from theme parties. Once, they showed up to the Terrace Club wearing homemade tunics and horned helmets, only to discover “Viking Night” was actually a five-piece emo band from Rahway.

  The third weekend in September, they’d aimed for “Space Odyssey” at Cottage, one of the WASPier eating clubs, which Esteban referred to as “Snottage.” David was hoping for a trippy, Kubrick-ian experience, but the space theme only meant purple black lights, glow-in-the-dark punch, and painted Styrofoam orbs (planets?) circling a disco ball (the sun?).

  David, Esteban, Owen, and Bob pseudo-danced in a circle together, trying to entice at least one girl into their orbit so that they didn’t look like four guys pseudo-dancing in a circle together. Owen and Esteban eventually got bored or uncomfortable and went to the taproom for a beer. Bob scanned the room and motioned David toward First-Floor Allie, a statuesque volleyball player in Forbes whom they all openly coveted. She was out of David’s league, height-wise. And otherwise. Still, he worked up the nerve to waddle over and bounce his knees near hers, purse his lips into some kind of dude dance face, trying to keep a beat.

  “I know you!” he screamed over the shrieking treble.

  “You’re in Forbes, right?” she said. “I am, too. Our fucking power is still off in the Annex.”

  “That sucks,” David yelled. “Do you need anything? Candles or whatever? We have a bathroom in our room if you need to take a shower or anything.”

  He meant it innocently, just trying to help and make conversation, but Allie gave him a shady look. She yelled, “You’re Soccer Bob’s friend, right?! Tell me your name again.”

  “David!”

  “Gabe, wait here a second!” She held up a finger and then ran off. David looked back and Bob was gone.

  So, I’ll just wait here then, David thought. Rolling solo. She’ll be back. Any minute now.

  Gathering the whole foursome usually took wild feats of social engineering. But tonight was Halloween. Tonight, they’d be a formidable crew. Grabbing his neon-green flyers, David strutted down to meet them all in Bob and Esteban’s room.

  The flyers read:

  Engaged in a dispute over personal honor? A blood feud?

  The favor of a lady? Want to prove you’re a badass?

  Without going to Afghanistan?

  Forget fisticuffs!!

  JOIN THE PRINCETON DUELING SOCIETY

  Inaugural Midnight Series

  - Challenge a rival or defend your honor!

  - Settle your disputes in a more civilized manner, with paintball guns!

  - Don’t actually die!

  HALLOWEEN – MIDNIGHT – POE FIELD

  BE THERE.

  Because why settle for a typical Halloween when you can shoot someone in the face instead?

  www.facebook.com/PDS

  Word had spread quickly: a single visionary—a freshman—had stepped up and created this safe forum for bellicosity. He’d purchased two sleek paintball handguns and launched a successful social media campaign. The PDS Facebook page promised students vs. professors, roommate vs. roommate, ideological throw-downs. Swiftly, matchups formed. It was something to distract them, an ancient channel for modern anger; something pseudo-violent to stem the tide of slap fights on campus and jolt the students into reflecting on their lives of privilege and entitlement.

  It was something different, something bold.

  It was something David Fuffman had created.

  Back in high school he’d run many a circus. He’d planned a blood drive for leukemia, a beef jerky sale for lupus. David was the dude behind the scenes, operationalizing the theoretical shit, giving it shape. He’d seen the documentary Hands on a Hard Body, about folks competing in an endurance contest to win a new Nissan truck. In the wake of global disasters, including the latest seismic activity in Port-au-Prince, David had staged his own fund-raiser stunt in the Pikesville High parking lot, which he called “Hands Across America on a Hyundai for Haitian Hematology.” He found a leukemia society in the ravaged land and made it his cause. How could humans cope with cancer and earthquakes? His event and its social media campaign raised $52,000, which was nuts, and when it boiled down to sleep deprivation, David pulled a caffeine pill from his secret belt buckle and kept going, reaching 101 hours awake. The local NBC affiliate did a story on it, which made him a minor local celebrity and probably helped him get into Princeton.

  This was more than an act, though.

  Unlike Batman, the essence of Superman, David realized, was that he’d been born that way. His powers manifested only on Earth, making him an accidental god among men. He took his station in life seriously, using his powers for good, and David understood his own privileged station, that he’d been born a white guy in America with parents who hung his art on their fridge and bought him unnecessary sneakers. There was a solid chance he’d never ever starve or go to jail. He realized his luck. Things could be so much worse.

  David planned to carry this sense of obligation to college, to a school whose motto was “Princeton in the nation’s service and the service of humanity.” Armed with a self-consciously retro Mead Trapper Keeper, David had arrived with the class of 2025 and poured himself into intellectual pursuits. Wordsworth, Machiavelli, Iacocca, he dove into the required reading, trying not to hate The Faerie Queene. He fed himself “world beat” from the Scheide Music Library and took campus tours, disseminating both official and unauthorized campus lore to other freshmen (“Scheide is the German word for vagina, you know”). And he dug his classes. Viral Marketing. Romanticism and Revolution. The Problem of Evil. And Oratory Leadership in Historical Perspective, which he hoped would boost his poor public speaking skills.

  The posh suburbia of the town of Princeton hadn’t offered much—a destination for yuppie shopping, with more high-end boutiques than head shops. The campus itself housed better secrets, David was sure, if approached scientifically.

  He’d started at the perimeter and worked his way inward, as if circling a prey. Princeton’s North Stars were a constellation of Firestone Library, the university chapel, and the stately Nassau Hall clock tower. In the south were the cogeneration and chilled water plants—the latter a bong-like smokestack surrounded by pipes and turbines—and Spinoza Field House, where hockey happened. To the east: the imposing black-cube Death Star of the Engineering Quad and the Peyton Observatory, a domed R2-D2. By the end of September, David had explored most of the campus’s exterior. He liked having a good lay of the land before his workload got more intense. Next, he wanted to go deeper.

  Someone famous once said, “Home is the place where you sleep and the place where you defecate.” So David systematically went about both human activities in as many campus buildings as possible. It’s nice to have attainable goals. He napped in the Whig and Clio debate halls, shat in the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. Structure by structure, he thought, I’ll take ownership of this place.

  David’s favorite building, hands down, was the Sloan Center for Integrated Scientific Materials (SCISM), a research lab funded by corporations and government agencies. The walls were corrugated purple metal, shifting color in the sunlight. It looked like a ninja training facility.

  But wouldn’t you know it, the only place that wouldn’t let him in for a snooze or to use the john, even when he faked an emergency, was SCISM. Reporters and corporate competitors had been caught spying, so only those with legit business were allowed in via photo swipe card.

  Owen was planning on majoring in mechanical engineering or chemical engineering or electrical engineering, so he actually got to go inside and said SCISM was “the academic laboratory at the tip of the pharmaceutical spear.” He sang the praises of SCISM’s nucl
ear pharmacy, its cyclotron, its CGMP compliance, its Cray Gemini 14-petaflop supercomputer—words and numbers that guarded the possibility of an infinite and magical future, where David and his generation could give up praying to invisible gods and, through technology, create their own omnipotence.

  Still, David’s image of college—leggy coeds on bright lawns, frat boys flinging Frisbees, everyone laughing and reading and smooching in the sun—was demolished by the storms of September.

  About two million people from South Carolina to New York without power for over a week, and about twenty lives claimed before rescue crews arrived from Tennessee. Parts of Forbes experienced rolling blackouts, but Princeton had good generators and fared fine. Still, it seemed more urgent than ever to unite the campus.

  Inspired by Professor Wingfield’s Oratory Leadership class, David decided to take a more active public role than he might have otherwise and launched the PDS in theatrical fashion. Here was the plan: during dinner, he’d wear a vintage suit and clink a glass and read aloud a speech and challenge none other than Bob Badalamenti to a duel and, by proxy, be respected and adored.

  In practice, it went down like this:

  “Gentlepersons of Forbes, your attention please!” Okay so far. David read from a shaky printout as sweat formed. “In the dawn of July 11, 1804, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton rowed to Weehawken, with their ‘seconds’ in tow, to finally, fatally lay waste to their discord…”

  By the time David finished this first sentence, he had indeed quieted the dining hall. But David’s strong opening soon disintegrated into a list of obsolete concepts like “portmanteaus” (cases for dueling pistols), and David soon saw that he was sucking the life out of the room.

  Luckily, Bob responded. Cartwheeling into the dining hall fresh from the soccer field and still wearing his shin guards (as David had instructed), he removed his sweaty shorts and slapped David across the face with them (this was improv), crying, “I challenge thee to a duel!”

  He sauntered out wearing only his jock strap.

  The crowd went wild. Guys barked at the dishonorable offense. Girls hooted at Bob’s butt cheeks. Plastered by the smell of Bob’s horrific sogginess, David waved genteelly, dabbed his face with a napkin, and announced the Facebook page and email address.

  The gauntlet had been thrown down. It was so on.

  David passed out his neon flyers and emails poured into PtonDuelingSociety@gmail.com with requests to join the Halloween undercard (Bob vs. David would be the main event). As the lineup formed, David couldn’t help fearing, from a showmanship standpoint, that he and Bob didn’t have the obvious dichotomy of the other scheduled duels: battles of the sexes, political opposites, et cetera. The only clear-cut difference David could pinpoint was that he was East Coast and Bob was West Coast. Their real rivalry existed below the surface, unspoken, a biological, lizard-brain sort of competitiveness linked to the fairer sex. Bob was idiotic around girls but somehow bedded many of them; David could hold a solid conversation but never sealed the deal. His longing nights usually culminated in a meatball sub from Hoagie Haven, a bong rip, a conversation with lonely guys on a ratty couch in Bob’s room (while Bob was likely or conspicuously in some girl’s room), chest-high speakers blasting in protest. On the rare occasion Bob was actually there, he’d put on his Mexican wrestling mask and really rub it in.

  “El Oso Terrible gets all the poon! Dave, you should ask more girls if they wanna shower with you, that’s great game! Room 331, tu es vales verga! Loose translation: you are worth penis!”

  He’d then perform a leaping jump kick from the top of his couch/turnbuckle.

  “Why, Lord?” Owen would plead, head in his palms after yet another strikeout. “I mean, I told her she was beautiful.”

  Jesus, David thought. At least I’m not the worst at this.

  Still, David slept alone, womanless and hoagie-full. He was jealous of Bob but could tell the feeling was mutual. Maybe this is why Bob agreed to duel me, David considered. I’m someone he wants to beat.

  Regardless. With the less than obvious reasons for their enmity, David felt they needed to distinguish their Halloween rivalry through costuming. David’s first pick was, of course, Batman.

  “You should be the Joker!” he suggested to Bob. “Batman vs. Joker.”

  “You should be a pansy-ass bitch,” Bob replied. “You should be fucking Robin.”

  “I’m Batman,” David stated, trying to be firm. He’d already purchased the pricey costume.

  “Well, I don’t really care what you are. I’m getting laid. And creepy Joker lipstick is not going to get my dills wet. I need to accentuate my positives.” Which meant he was going shirtless.

  David tried another tactic. Fishing Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns off his bookshelf, he opened up to a spread of the Mutant Leader, the graphic novel’s beastly villain. He was shirtless, with wraparound shades and aggressive nipples. Bob loved it.

  So when David walked into Bob’s room on Halloween, he was expecting a true nemesis. Instead, Bob was indeed shirtless, but on his head was that Mexican wrestling mask. A sequined blue-and-white thing with holes for his eyes, nose, and mouth.

  “Holy shit!” said Owen, wearing his ROTC camo gear, sizing David up. Esteban, dressed as a foppish dandy with a frilly shirt and monocle, squeezed one of David’s fake pecs.

  Pointing at Bob’s face, David asked, “What happened to the Mutant Leader?”

  “I’m going as a Mexican wrestler: El Oso Terrible!” He zestfully rolled his Rs.

  “Dude, it makes no sense with the Batman costume and—”

  “He could pass for Bane,” offered Owen.

  “Doesn’t Bane wear some kind of gas mask?” David asked.

  “You’re thinking of the movie. The original comic book villain was a Mexican wrestler. For a guy who loves superheroes you don’t really know comic books, huh?”

  “My relationship to superheroes is mystical,” David said. “Not fundamentalist.”

  “Nobody cares if our costumes match,” Bob snapped. “Now, here, bump this line of yip and take this shot of Rumple Minze before I suplex you. And I’m bringing this little buddy for later,” he said, waving a small vial. “This shit is my new favorite, it’s like Molly plus booze, with no hangover.” David had a hard time justifying the cocaine—a new drug added to his repertoire—but without much cajoling he put a rolled Wawa receipt to his nose and watched the powder disappear inside him. Tonight was his debut.

  Within seconds, and at some length, David found himself elucidating to his hall mates: Why Batman? In high school, David had fallen hard for Batman. And why not? Bruce Wayne saw the world in human terms. He was a man of extraordinary intellect, blessed with cash and an infinite utility belt of ass-kicking toys. His alter ego was a bat, an honorable mirror of his fears, a demon exorcised nightly. What did sacrifice mean to Superman, a Man of Steel, able to stop bullets, turn back time, leap buildings in a single bound? No, it was Batman, the vulnerable Dark Knight, who understood life and anguish and stuff. Plus, Batman was the most capitalist-friendly superhero. A rich innovator, he could dream any vehicle, any weapon, any potion, and poof! It was his. Having money makes you almost invincible.

  Meanwhile, say what you will about the privilege of alien Superman, but he worked a day job.

  There are three types of superheroes, David continued, really feeling it now: the Supermen, Wonder Women, Thors, and X-Men mutants, with powers inborn; there are the Spider-Men, Hulks, Dr. Manhattans, and Deadpools, acquiring their powers accidentally, via science; and a third kind—the Batmen, Iron Men, Captain Americas, Black Panthers—those not content to stick to baseline mortal means, who proactively gain or enhance their powers. Even if they have to cheat.

  Like a lapsed Catholic finding the Church again, David came back to Spider-Man and Superman in the summer before college and merged their spiritualities with that of Batman, godfather of the self-made superhero. David solidified this holy superhero trinity into three
tenets:

  1. Be like Superman: Cultivate your God-given gifts, count your blessings, don’t whine. Shit could be worse.

  2. Be like Spider-Man: Surround yourself with radioactive arachnids and fall headlong into their webs.

  3. Be like Batman: When destiny fails, use your smoke pellets.

  ii.

  Midnight. They strutted onto Poe Field—a soldier, a dandy, a wrestler, and a Batman—joining some five hundred other costumed coeds. There were flappers, hippies, several Elvii. Sexy angels and devils, sassy Dorothys, sultry Cleopatras, fairies, nymphs, genies, cheerleaders, French maids, entire staffs of nurses in fishnet thigh-highs. Poe Field was a male fantasy. Barely bright enough to ogle. The guys got some stares of their own as they entered the mass. Bob with his barrel chest. David with his movie-quality supersuit. Esteban jauntily twirling his cane. Owen in fatigues. Men in uniform. It was unseasonably warm and only drizzling for a change. David sweated beneath his rubber bodysuit. He realized, with some ire, that Bob was positioned as the front man. Still, their collective swagger was in full effect. Did people know who they were? Who David was? Did they know he was responsible for all this? Should they strut even slower?

  Tucked behind the mythical SCISM building, Poe Field was a manicured swatch of grass used by the varsity soccer team for practice. As they entered the scrum, Bob high-fived a pirate and said, “Dónde booze?”

  The pirate pointed to a clump of costumed kids on the bleachers and droned, “Beer…” He then pointed to another huddle by the far soccer goal and giddily whispered, “Absinthe…”